The present invention relates to a method and its system for monitoring a quality of electronic circuits equipped with a database of detection information of the quality and manufacturing conditions of electronic circuits detected in each manufacturing process and a display unit for displaying a verious kind of processed data by processing the contents in the database.
More particularly, the present invention relates to a monitoring method and its system which enables to appropriately monitor the quality and manufacturing conditions of electronic circuits formed on a substrate by detecting its images in each process or each substrate and extracting characteristic quantities from the images and outputting on a display a designated statistical data calcurated from the extracted characteristic amounts of the images.
In the prior art, in case of mounting electronic components onto a substrate to form electronic circuits on the substrate, to adjust a manufacturing conditions for mounting electronic components onto a new substrate, a new substrate description is introduced or to identify the factor responsible for any fault that has arisen in a manufacturing process, the fault factor is identified or the manufacturing conditions are adjusted by directly observing the mounted position or on the basis of the total of feature quantities, such as misalignment, to grasp correlation between the mounted conditions of electronic components and the manufacturing conditions.
However, it requires a vast volume of work and is difficult to grasp diverse correlation""s between the mounted conditions of components and the manufacturing conditions for each of the wide variety of substrate types by direct observation. On the other hand, attempts are being made to support grasping of the mounted conditions by using external checking apparatuses to detect feature quantities representing the mounted conditions, such as the quantity of misalignment, summing the detected quantities and graphically displaying them, but, as it is difficult to accurately detect feature quantities of a new description, for which conditioning of the checking apparatus is inadequate, it may be difficult to correlate the feature quantities and the mounted conditions. Furthermore, the conventionally used one-dimensional graphic expression of feature quantities, though effective for identifying specific trends of the mounted conditions of components, such as misalignment, can hardly be utilized for grasping more general trends of the mounted conditions.
The present invention therefore is intended, in view of the problems noted above, to provide a monitoring system for the quality and manufacturing conditions of electronic circuits capable of supporting the grasping of trends of mounted conditions by selectively displaying, out of a detection information database of the positions where electronic circuits are formed, images well depicting the features of sets of images fitting the conditions for retrieval, or mullet-dimensionally displaying the distribution of feature quantities and the like within the substrate plane.
In order to achieve this object, a monitoring system for the quality and manufacturing conditions of electronic circuits according to the invention, is configured of a database storing, for instance, detected image data on prescribed positions of an electronic circuit formed on a substrate, feature quantities of the prescribed positions calculated on the basis of these detected image data, design information, and manufacturing conditions; a statistical processor for executing statistical processing on a set of data extracted from the database using as the retrieval condition at least one of the feature quantities, design information and manufacturing conditions; and a data display unit for supplying data indicating the results of statistical processing or specific data contained in the set of data on the basis of statistical processing by this statistical processor.